Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

I’m a prescriptivist. I admit it. I’m even a prescriptivist of a type that’s catalogued in Language Log: A Field Guide to Prescriptivists, namely a Fashion Prescriptivist.

Fashion– how an admired group talks. Deviation is alienation.

In my particular case the admired group is quite specific: Jane Austen. I recognize the point that descriptivist linguistics makes, that linguistic fashions are arbitrary and that there is nothing intrinsic in Standard English, or any other form, that makes it superior. But if the choice is arbitrary, then we might as well plump for the version of the language that lets us read Pride and Prejudice (and, as an added benefit, English literature since then). It would be a tragedy if there came a point where “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” needed a gloss for the modern native English-speaking reader as the opening of Romeo and Juliet now does:

SAMPSON

Gregory, o’ my word, we’ll not carry coals.

GREGORY

No, for then we should be colliers.

SAMPSON

I mean, an we be in choler, we’ll draw.

Short of that, it’s all good.

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Thanks to fellow Grammar God, Tun Yin for the link.

Jason , of My blogging experiment, asked in one of the comments for my suggestions on blog and wiki software that he might use in teaching ESL. Rather than bury my answer in the comments, I’ll put it here.

Blogs

It’s no longer possible to get a legal copy of MovableType 2.6, with its unlimited number of blogs and authors, and MT 3.0D is insanely expensive if you want each student to either be an author, have a blog, or both, so that leaves out MT unless you want to try begging SixApart for a special academic license (to be fair, they’ve indicated a willingness to consider such ad hoc licenses, but I don’t know of them granting any, and honestly, why bother?).

This blog uses WordPress 1.2, and I’m reasonably impressed with it so far; the only drawbacks are it requires a MySQL back end (which may or may not be an issue depending on your host) and so far it really seems like the best way to have multiple blogs is to install the software multiple times, once per blog. It’s not hard to set up, but multiple blogs isn’t exactly a straight-out-of-the-box feature for it yet.

My advice, though, would be to get the students to set up their own blogs at one of the free services like LiveJournal. That way, somebody else has all the headaches of hosting. Plus, LiveJournal would let the students view the blog controls in their native languages (might be helpful for an ESL course). In addition, LiveJournal would make it easy for the students in the class to add each other as Friends, and so be able to see when anyone in the class has a new update. Free and no setup required, what could be better?

Wikis

There’s lots of wiki software out there; the basic idea is simple enough that everybody and his brother hacks one together as a fun programming project. Some, like moin-moin have advanced features like plug-ins, but they’re usually harder to set up. (Moin-moin certainly is, or at least it makes assumptions about what your hosting service allows that neither of mine fulfill.)

I use UseMod Wiki and it could hardly be easier to set up. It’s really just a single Perl file and a couple of helper files. Change a couple of parameters in the config, Upload the perl file to your cgi-bin, create a directory and put the config files in it and set permissions, and you’re done. To have multiple wikis, just copy the wiki.pl to a new name, and create a new directory and configs. (You could actually probably do this with sub-wikis, which UseMod allows, but whole new wikis are so easy why bother? UseMod even allows wiki entries to point to entries in other wikis, so cross-referencing between them is no big deal.)

The only drawback to UseMod that I’ve found, and it really wouldn’t matter to the vast majority of users, is that it’s not quite as easy to hack as I would like. I was able to hack Brad Choate’s Textile2 plugin for MovableType within a few minutes to allow shortcuts for typing HTML entities like ō without needing to write & #333; I tried to do the same thing for UseMod and gave up after a couple of hours. They’re both written in Perl, it’s just that UseMod’s structure is a bit harder for me to grok.

If readers have specific questions or issues, I’m usually happy to try to help, particularly with software that I use and think I understand.

For people who’ve landed directly on this blog without passing through the entry page to the site, some things on this site that might be of some interest:

* Old English Wiki - a wiki with information on Old English
* Latin Wiki - a wiki with information on Latin
* BlogLatin - a blog about learning Latin
* Latin Word Lookup - a program I wrote to look up words in Latin (based on the Whitaker word list) and inflect them

Wikis, if you’re not familiar with them, are a type of collaborative web-publishing software that makes it easy to create hyperlinked pages. Wiki pages can be edited from the web by clicking on a special link on the page, and when you save the page the software searches for any text that has MixedCaseLikeThis and dynamically turns it into a link to a page of the same name; if that page doesn’t yet exist clicking on the link creates a blank page with that name. Currently the most famous wiki is the Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedia. Blogs are great for chronologically ordered material, or at least material where cross-referencing within the site doesn’t matter much, but wikis are much better for heavily cross-referenced information.

More things that I wish I knew when I first set out (feel free to take these cum grano salis. I’m not a language teacher, nor am I you, your milage may vary, etc.):

When it comes to exposing yourself to the language, don’t stick to the path beaten by the textbook and course materials. You need to encounter the language in the wild, and to that end you should be promiscuous in your reading materials. Language Log makes a really good point about the dread textbook sentences that demonstrate a feature of the grammar, but no native speaker would ever actually say. (”The pen of my aunt…”) The more the merrier, and if it’s not all carefully selected to be appropriate to your current skill, so much the better. Actually, if you can afford it, having more than one textbook can be really useful to contrast the approaches of the authors; sometimes it just helps to have a grammatical point explained in a different fashion. If you have access to native speakers, that’s good too, but as someone whose current interests are Latin and Old English I don’t want to make too much of that. Watching TV and listening to radio in the language (if available) are also good, particularly for training your ear to hear word boundaries, but it’s pretty easy to fool yourself that you’re studying when you’re actually just watching TV.

Try to learn the example sentences and longer passages by heart, particularly if they’re selected from actual literature in the language. I find it really helps to be able to anchor grammatical knowledge in concrete examples. When you’re thinking about whether a sentence is grammatical in your native language, you often construct sample sentences that you know are valid to compare it to; when it’s not your native language your ability to spontaneously generate such sentences is going to be much more limited–having a ready-to-mind stock of sentences that you know pass muster with native speakers can help.

Be bold. Native speakers misspeak all the time, and the language police don’t hold them up to public humiliation, unless the speaker’s name is Bush. If you try to stick to only what you’ve thoroughly mastered, in speech or writing, then you’re going to spend much too much time creeping about tentatively in “The pen of my aunt…” territory, which ought to be just as embarrassing, as well as being boring for you and your audience.